Donald Broadbent

Who was Donald Broadbent?

Donald Eric Broadbent FRS was an influential experimental psychologist from the U.K. His career and research bridged the gap between the pre-WWII approach of Sir Frederic Bartlett and what became known as Cognitive Psychology in the late 1960s.

Educated at the University of Cambridge, in 1958 he became director of the Applied Psychology Research Unit, set up by the UK Medical Research Council in 1944 to focus on Frederick Bartlett's work. Although most of the work at the APRU was directed at practical issues of the military or private industry, Broadbent became well known for his theoretical work. His theories of Selective Attention and Short-Term Memory were developed as digital computers were becoming available to the academic community, and were among the first to use computer analogies to make serious contributions to the analysis of human cognition. These theories were combined to form what became known as the "single channel hypothesis." Broadbent's filter model of attention proposed that the physical characteristics of an auditory message were used to focus attention to only a single message. Broadbent's filter model is referred to as an Early Selection Model because irrelevant messages are filtered out BEFORE the stimulus information is processed for meaning. These and other theories were brought together in his 1958 book Perception and Communication, which remains one of the classic texts of cognitive psychology. In 1974 Broadbent became a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and returned to applied science; along with his colleague Dianne Berry, he developed new ideas about implicit learning from consideration of human performance in complex industrial processes.